glorious fun! It was a pity. Well has the Persian said that when we come
to die we, remembering that God is merciful, will gnaw our elbows with
remorse for thinking of the things we have not done for fear of the Day
of Judgment.

And I wanted peaches and syrup--badly. We had them at the hut, sweeter
and more luscious than you can imagine. And we had been without sugar for
a month. Yes--especially the syrup.

Thus impiously I set out to die, making up my mind that I was not going
to try and keep warm, that it might not take too long, and thinking I
would try and get some morphia from the medical case if it got very bad.
Not a bit heroic, and entirely true! Yes! comfortable, warm reader. Men
do not fear death, they fear the pain of dying.

And then quite naturally and no doubt disappointingly to those who would
like to read of my last agonies (for who would not give pleasure by his
death?) I fell asleep. I expect the temperature was pretty high during
this great blizzard, and anything near zero was very high to us. That
and the snow which drifted over us made a pleasant wet kind of snipe
marsh inside our sleeping-bags, and I am sure we all dozed a good bit.
There was so much to worry about that there was not the least use in
worrying; and we were so _very_ tired. We were hungry, for the last meal
we had had was in the morning of the day before, but hunger was not very
pressing.

And so we lay, wet and quite fairly warm, hour after hour while the wind
roared round us, blowing storm force continually and rising in the gusts
to something indescribable. Storm force is force 11, and force 12 is the
biggest wind which can be logged: Bowers logged it force 11, but he was
always so afraid of overestimating that he was inclined to underrate. I
think it was blowing a full hurricane. Sometimes awake, sometimes dozing,
we had not a very uncomfortable time so far as I can remember. I knew
that parties which had come to Cape Crozier in the spring had experienced
blizzards which lasted eight or ten days. But this did not worry us as
much as I think it did Bill: I was numb. I vaguely called to mind that
Peary had survived a blizzard in the open: but wasn't that in the summer?

It was in the early morning of Saturday (July 22) that we discovered the
loss of the tent. Some time during that morning we had had our last meal.
The roof went about noon on Sunday and we had had no meal in the interval
because our supply of oil was so low;